Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, 1976
Starring:
Vitus Zeplichal, Elke Aberle, Alexander Allerson
While
in a prison, a young man named Peter relates his tale to a therapist. Much of
his early life was spent trying to win his mother’s love, for naught. As a
young adult, his training as a bricklayer gives him the skills to build a house
for his parents. They are appreciative and loving for just a few weeks, then
his mother returns to her callous indifference. He marries Erika, a local girl
and decides they will move to Munich to impress his parents. He gets a low-paying
job in construction, but tries to prove his love for Erika with lavish presents
and furniture for their apartment. This quickly puts him in debt, though he
seems addicted to spending and refuses to ask his parents for financial help.
When he loses his job, it puts him quickly over the edge…
I Only Want You to Love
Me is
one of Fassbinder’s lesser-seen made-for-TV movies, but one that fits snugly
with the core themes of domestic hell, social alienation, and economic
repression found in almost all of his films from the mid-‘70s. Beginning with The Merchant of the Four Seasons and
continuing through Bremen Freedom, Jail
Bait, Eight Hours are Not a Day, Fear Eats the Soul, Effi Briest, Nora Helmer,
Martha, Fox and His Friends, Fear of Fear, and Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, by I Only Want You to Love Me, Fassbinder had examined nearly every
angle of this theme with a variety of abused and oppressed characters as his
protagonists.
If
I Only Want You to Love Me remains a
minor effort in Fassbinder’s oeuvre, it is because he had already examined the
following protagonists: a man who commits suicide after his oppressive family
drives him to despair, a woman who systematically poisons her oppressive family,
a teenage girl who goads her lover to kill her controlling father when he tries
to keep them apart, a woman who dies after she is abandoned by her oppressive family
because of an old affair, a woman who leaves her family when she realizes how
oppressive it is, a woman driven insane by her abusive husband, a gay man
driven to suicide by his manipulative and greedy lover, a woman driven insane
by her family, and a woman driven to communism by her husband’s murder-suicide.
While
I Only Want You to Love Me is based
on the 1972 non-fiction book Life: Transcripts
Behind Bars by Klaus Antes, Christiane Ehrhardt, and Heinrich Hannover, the
material is hardly new to Fassbinder. Peter – Satan’s Brews’s Vitus Zeplichal in a remarkable performance – is an
evolution of The Merchant of the Four
Seasons’ Hans, a man driven to insanity because of the cruelty he
experiences at the hands of his mother. She rejects the life he imagines for
himself, insisting that he become a fruit seller, and coldly frustrates his
attempts at intimacy and affection. Peter’s mother is cut from the same cloth
and it is interesting to follow the trajectory of Fassbinder’s mother
characters up to this point.
At
best, these mothers interfere with their sons, daughters, and daughters-in-law,
and are controlling and driven by bourgeois obsessions. Sometimes they are seem
to be sympathetic and understanding, but only if their children follow the
behavior they deem appropriate (The
Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Jail Bait, Effi Briest). Later, they are
perverse (The American Soldier),
cruel (Merchant of the Four Seasons,
Bremen Freedom, Fear of Fear), and insane (Martha). Notable exceptions are the three characters played by
Brigitte Mira in Fear Eats the Soul
and Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven,
where the protagonist of both is a mother treated cruelly by her children. Peter’s
mother is the first to practice actual physical abuse. In an early scene, the
young Peter brings her a bouquet of flowers taken from a neighbor’s garden.
What Peter and his father sees as an act of generosity and love is taken to be
a criminal act by his mother, who beats him with a wooden hanger until it
breaks.
This
theme of the mother and her vital importance to I Only Want You to Love Me makes this one of Fassbinder’s most
quietly personal films. Fassbinder’s own childhood was allegedly a lonely,
difficult one, and was marked by his parents’ divorce and his mother’s frequent
absences. He noted in an interview (which can be found in The Anarchy of the Imagination) that he spent much of his time
alone at the cinema, which soon became his stand-in for family and affection. Fassbinder’s
own mother would appear throughout his films, beginning with a role as the
grieving mother in Gods of the Plague.
Though she only appears in a side role in this film, her aloof, almost
disdainful beauty is echoed in Ernie Mangold (Before Sunrise), the prolific actress who plays Peter’s mother.
In
I Only Want You to Love Me, Fassbinder
uses the mother figure – represented by Peter’s mother, his wife Erika, who
soon becomes a mother, Erika’s kindly but lonely grandmother, and even the
prison therapist – as a conduit to explore the evils of the West German
economic miracle. This time of financial prosperity is turned into an
authoritarian prison by Fassbinder, a place of paranoia and anxiety where
everyone seems to be against Peter and can tell that he is somehow different,
somehow inferior. In typical Fassbinder fashion, Peter makes many mistakes and
seemingly entrenches himself in misery on purpose. Every time he wants to feel
loved, he buys another large bouquet of colorful flowers for a woman (his
mother, his wife, her grandmother), echoing the first bouquet that earned him a
vicious beating.
Perhaps
ironically, the colorful flowers, symbolic of nature, fertility, romance, and
courtship, are otherwise absent from the film’s gray industrial landscape.
Munich is depicted as a bleak, urban space devoid of color or life. The film’s
most beautiful scenes, courtesy of Fassbinder’s regular cinematographer Michael
Ballhaus, are stark shots of the Munich subway, which Peter rides all day
because he no longer has a job, but hasn’t admitted this to his wife. Like Fox’s
suicide in the subway in Fox and His
Friends, this is a death journey, a descent into a middle class hell that
culminates in dissociation, violence, murder, and incarceration.
Available
on DVD from
Olive Films, I Only Want You to Love
Me is a fascinating example of Fassbinder at his most introspective and
psychological. It is marked by excellent cinematography and performances, as
well as solid score from Fassbinder’s regular collaborator Peer Raben. It’s not
an ideal starting place for newcomers, but is a must-see for Fassbinder fans,
as it examines an issue Fassbinder struggled with throughout his life: the desperate,
often misguided search for love.
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